In 12-step programs, Step 3 is seen as crucial by many–“Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God.”  Many new to these programs may be experiencing difficulties with the word or concept of “God,” so substitutions abound:  Higher Power, the Universe, the group itself, Nature.  When I first sat in 12-step rooms, I was angry with my inherited ideas of God because representatives had acted in ways I found immoral and reprehensible.  A wise veteran in the program suggested that I insert the name of my favorite author, so I directed my insouciant prayers to Virginia Woolf–and it worked.  Recently, a woman who’s been in a group we share for 30-some years spoke on the step for that day’s meeting.  It was Step 3 and she focused on just what “will” involved for her at this stage in her life.  After sharing some standard definitions, e.g., “the power of making a reasoned choice” and “the particular desire, purpose, pleasure, choice of a certain person,” she began musing more personally.  Pointing out that “willful” and “willing” must share the same etymological root, this woman spoke movingly about her own journey from trying to “fix” her relationships by being willful to inhabiting a space where openness prevailed.

In the time since I listened to this wise person’s thoughts, I’ve come to some telling realizations of my own about these two words.  Growing up around a mother who loved me and who needed a lot of attention from me, I became quite willful in that I felt it necessary to grit my teeth and form emotional (and sometimes literal) fists so I could stand my ground and assert my young will just to remind myself that I existed as an entity separate from hers.  When she “punished” me by making me sit in a closed room without books or crayons, I willed myself into a positive place where I made up fascinating stories in which I starred as hero/villain/helpless victim.  In one such episode, my mother stood on the other side of the door that shut me out of life and said “All right, Honey, you can come out now.”  My little willful self stayed in the room for additional minutes, telling myself I was not finished with MY story.  In later life, as I bungled my way through one relationship after the next, the common denominator was my militantly willful belief that I knew just what the other person should do to be successful/healthy/happy/loving, only to find myself repeatedly coping with that other person’s gradual but sure retreat from me and our shared life.

Finally, I relented just a little and walked into an Al-Anon meeting where a bunch of other women of all sorts sat for an hour listening to each other’s stories of trying to give up “fixing” other people (being “willful,” surely).  Instead they spoke about a slow and painful coming to understand that such behavior not only cost them friends and intimacy but finally exhausted them emotionally and physically.  I remember one story in particular:  a group member told us that a new friend had asked her how she was.  She had responded by saying “Well, Harry is drinking again but I’m trying to show him what to do to stop.”  That person’s willfulness ended up erasing her from the equation except as the person trying to run another person’s life.  Gradually, as I listened to those much further along a recovery path than I was share what it might mean to approach life with open hands rather than clenched fists, I began to ease up just a fraction and, significantly, to ask who I was in myself rather than in relation to some other human being.  The program was asking me to put myself first, not as an act of selfishness but in order to know where I start and stop and someone else begins.  The process of doing this seems to me now the process of moving from “willful” to “willing” because meeting life with open hands and heart means I relinquish control over method and outcome.  I even get to live in the moment more often and that’s amazingly fresh ground to occupy.

People who know me grasp early own that I have set ways of doing things in my home:  shoes off at the door; no water used in the beautiful cobalt blue kitchen apron sink because water drops might spot the dark blue surface; Patches, my beloved kitty, eats her dinner at 5:10 p.m. even if going on or off daylight savings time seems unreal to her stomach.  Well, I’m clearly becoming much more “willing” these days because at my recent gathering of women friends to mark the Winter Solstice, I made a sign that I taped to the front door.  It read in part “NO NEED TO REMOVE SHOES.”  I told myself I was saying that because we were experiencing a dry and unseasonably warm string of days, so shoes would not “track” unwanted debris into my house.  The first people who arrived were a couple I’ve known for forty years.  They stood at the threshold open-mouthed and said “We don’t know how to act!”  Though we all laughed, and though several other attendees remarked about being thrown completely off kilter by the sign, I understand that being “willing” rather than “willful” means being flexible.  It’s new territory but I find it like it and am thinking of other little “signs” I can make to myself about relaxing some rule that may not even be functional any longer, whatever its original purpose might have been.  As I recently abandoned a long-standing policy around recording facts when filling my gas tank, I couldn’t even remember why I had agreed many years ago to start keeping such a detailed record of this mundane process.  As I tossed the little booklet full of such minutiae into recycle, I smiled.  “Willing” seems to carry unexpected benefits to me, let alone what it may bring to those who choose to relate to me.

My last blog was a poem about my being robbed years ago and some words about all invasion of our privacy by technology.  One of my frequent readers has asked me to say more about privacy rights here as opposed to in European countries, so here goes.  As of May 2018, countries in the European Union (EU) are functioning under strict laws aimed at protecting individual’s privacy.  There are strict fines attached if Internet companies or other commercial entities collect or sell your information without your consent.  These laws will mean it will be harder for entities like Facebook to collect, store, and sell such information.  They also make it easy for groups of individuals to file class action suits if the laws are not obeyed.  In my last post, I argued that one reason European countries might be trying to monitor who knows what about all of us might be that they are a lot older than the United States and so have experienced what can happen if people we don’t know know lots about us.

If you Google “bright shiny objects,” you find that there is a formal syndrome by this name.  What I know about such objects is they fascinate chickens.  There are endless stories of people who play with or even try to train their chickens by tossing things like metal keys or little shards of brightly colored substances at the chickens.  The fowls will immediately dash to the newly tossed item, demonstrating what the syndrome describes as multiple distractions.   While this is amusing on a farm or in an urban back yard, it bothers teachers or employers who need their students or workers to concentrate so as to be the most productive.  What I think about these days are all the rapidly appearing new ways to use smart phones and other electronic devices to let us act remotely.  There’s a clever ad I see on television in which two young men approach a dark house or garage, only to hear a voice in space greeting them, followed by a literal bright light’s coming on and an alarm’s going off as the would-be robbers flee.  This is all made possible by the home owner’s have an APP that lets her/him “see” what’s going on at their home while they are miles or even countries away.  Or the newest hiding place for cameras in one’s eye glasses.  Today’s consumers seem like those chickens in that we are quickly fascinated by the latest invention that gives us information or pleasure.  The only problem is most of those inventions become available only after we have allowed yet another invisible company know all sorts of personal facts about us.  And, of course, there are the stories that have become legion about parents or college admissions committees and employment officers who find out their child who is now a potential student or employee has sent friends some picture that never goes away and so haunts the sender, sometimes with decidedly negative consequences.

I’m not the only person worried about all the addictive distractions coming onto the market.  Yuval Harari, the Israeli futurist philosopher recently published a book detailing just how dangerous all these fast-moving gadgets can be, not only to individuals but to the very idea of democracy itself.  He believes that we are being lured into mindless consumption that dulls the brain and empties the pocketbook.  As for the growing use of robotic workers, Mr. Harari predicts the creation of a literally “throw-away,” useless class of people in the not-s0-distant future.  His personal way of resisting is to spend two hours a day in complete silence.

So what’s one to do about this conundrum that is spreading into more and more facets of our lives?  Well, those sites that explore the shiny objects syndrome advise several obvious things, e.g., slow down and think about the consequences of engaging in or owning the latest technological “breakthrough.”  Or at least ask basic questions about the storage and sharing of personal information before giving it away with the click of a key.  For me, there is a simpler if potentially old-fashioned course of action (or rather inaction, as it turns out):  I ask myself if what the new bright thing promises will have staying power, or it if really is just a shiny distraction that will need replacing by its technological cousin.  And it seems more people are thinking about this loss of privacy as giant corporations like Facebook are having to admit that they exercise far too little control over what they collect and distribute.  Maybe we are maturing faster than we might have thought possible as we try to keep up with the barrage of new “shinies.”

As this country embraces more and more computer-based programs and devices that register and maintain personal information about all of us, I find myself thinking about privacy rights.  Recently I heard a program on MPR about how much more seriously such rights are taken in European countries than this one.  As I pondered this fact, I thought about the difference in ages of North America and France or Italy or Germany.  Their collective memories are so much older than ours, which means they’ve witnessed and paid the price of invasions of privacy more often.  Maybe we are just too excited by new shiny objects like glasses that can tell us how fast our heart is beating.  

But surely anyone who has had their home robbed feels acutely just how invaded a person can feel.  Many years ago, I had gone to my professional meeting, always held right after Christmas.  My then lover had volunteered to go to my house twice a day to feed my kitty, so I thought all was well.  As I exited a taxi at my front door, I saw her standing just inside it, looking distinctly worried.  Her first words were “Toni, you’ve been robbed.” Initially I was just relieved that my companion animal was safe, but when I went through the living room, up the stairs, and into my bed room, a feeling of fear engulfed me and stayed with me for weeks.  When I’d get home from work, I’d look under my bed and inside all closets, go down the basement steps with a flashlight, and still feel unsafe and like I needed to take extra showers.

Finally, I decided to write a poem and see if that might help.  It did.  I was finally able to go back to feeling safe in my story-and-a-half “nest.”  Recently I came upon that old poem and was propelled right back to that overwhelming sense of dis-ease and uncenteredness, so I decided to revise my lines and share them here.

Robbed

6 charms and 8 scarabs
strung on golden wires,
links I wear around my wrist,
part of my circumference–
ripped away by giant hands
that leave an acrid stench all through my space

8 records of a woman playing Chopin
in themselves irreplaceable–
a gift from my mother at 15

a mantle cleaner than I left it,
minus a bronze bull fighter statuette–
a gift from my sister at 35

My bed was handled, pillow thrown askew,
naked with no case.
That case now holds droppings from my life
stolen from pockets of my rooms;
seen without permission,
lost without recourse